Giant portrait of Emiliano Sala on the lawn of the La Beaujoire stadium, before the Nantes-Bordeaux match, on January 26, 2020, a year after his disappearance on a planeAFP
The condition of the plane in which Argentine footballer Emiliano Sala died, which crashed in the English Channel in early 2019, had worried its pilot before takeoff, who described it as ” dangerous in a voicemail message left for a friend. David Ibbotson, 59, had been assigned to transport the 28-year-old player from Cardiff, where he had just been transferred for 17 million euros, to Nantes, so that he could say goodbye to his former teammates, then to bring him back to Wales. In a voice message left to a pilot friend, which the BBC obtained and broadcast in a podcast devoted to the case, Mr. Ibbotson expressed doubts about the safety of the device, after the outward flight between Cardiff and Nantes.
